The standard twentieth-century scholarly assumption that Delarivier Manley wrote Queen Zarah and the Zarazians (1705) has led most Manley scholars to presume that Manley had already become a Tory propaganda writer by 1705 and that she already knew John Barber at this time. J. A. Downie's critical reassessment of the authorship of Queen Zarah changes the way we view what Manley was doing and writing, and from whom she was seeking patronage, not only in 1705 but also during the subsequent three to four years before she wrote The New Atalantis (which she might have begun some time in 1708 or else in early 1709).

Once we acknowledge that Manley probably did not write Queen Zarah, then we see that it was in 1706, rather than 1705, that Manley recommenced the writing career she had essentially suspended in 1696, having published only the two poems in The Nine Muses in the intervening years. Her return to writing did not begin with a secret history but with a tragedy for the stage, Almyna: or, The Arabian Vow. The next year, she brought out her second epistolary prose work, The Unknown Lady's Pacquet of Letters, a work that resembles her subsequent secret histories The New Atalantis and Memoirs of Europe in its incorporation of anecdotes about well-known public figures. Careful analysis of The Unknown Lady's Pacquet helps us to delineate a continuum between Manley's early autobiographical epistolary writing and her subsequent politically charged secret histories, offering a more plausible trajectory of Manley's career as a writer and a political satirist than is possible if we assume that she wrote Queen Zarah.

Queen Zarah and the Zarazians

The personal difficulties that Manley was experiencing in 1704 and 1705 – the failed palimony case, the problems with paying the debt for the care of her children, and her December 1705 imprisonment – suggest that she would have had many concerns more pressing to her than the details of the May 1705 parliamentary elections, the partisan furor surrounding Occasional Conformity legislation, or Tory complaints against ‘moderation’.